Bank of the West Homepage Redesign

Before

Client Profile and ChallengeThe Multichannel Group was growing and changing. The brand coming from the marketing group was evolving into an edgier, sleeker look. And their homepage was reflecting none of these things. In 2012 and 2013, Bank of the West was undergoing large scale changes that made a website redesign a must – starting with the homepage.

Some of the elements of the previous page to be addressed included:

Outdated logos and branding

A small, restricted space for the hero carousel, where the Bank of the West brand is defined big landscape imagery

A cluttered, boxy page with too many links and misplaced information

Numerous and confusing calls to action

SolutionThe discovery for the redesign began in 2012. We gathered information from sources such as marketing, product owners, IT, web developers, analytics and more.

The focus of the new design is the large, edge-to-edge carousel to accommodate the bank’s brand imagery. The look and feel of their new logo (a sleek, single-tone bear) carries through the page with soft gradients and large, easy to read text that also looks and works great on tablets. The old boxes of links throughout the page have been condensed into a mega menu style navigation across the top with clear delineation by product line. Large, tap-able marketing areas feature under the hero as well as contextually in the mega menu. Finally, clear focus is brought to the online banking sign in box – which was determined to be the main action for over 90% of page visitors.

We then brought the design into usability testing – the first testing to be done in the multichannel group. The tests were so valuable and successful that they have become a must for any large digital undertaking in the bank. Results were used not only to tweak the design from good to great, but also to socialize the redesign within the organization and bring the entire company on board with hard evidence that this was what their customers wanted.

After

ResultsThe redesign successfully launched in 2013, rolled out to subdomains over the next 10 months and has set the new standard for digital projects, both in approach and in design.